


Just Blue

by aurumdalseni (kyo_chan)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, But I did my best, Gen, Just lost, but I'm a sap so she's not really DEAD, not sure that's an accurate tag, tagged character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24404701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyo_chan/pseuds/aurumdalseni
Summary: When the St. Mark's vigil takes more from Blue than she or anyone expects, it sets the tale of Gansey's quest for Glendower on a slightly different path. But these are still her raven boys, and she will still be with them.
Kudos: 14
Collections: TRC/ CDTH Prompt Week 2020





	Just Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Here's day 3 of the [TRC/CDTH Prompt Week](https://pynchpromptweek.tumblr.com/post/615677667456548864/trc-dreamer-trilogy-prompt-week-spring-2020)! The prompt was reincarnation AU, which I have _never written before_. If I'm being perfectly honest, I'm still not sure that's what I wrote, but I did my best. I really didn't want anyone to die, and this is what happens when I'm weak. Thank you for reading!

**I.**

_ “Please. Will you tell me your name?” _

_ “Gansey.” _

“Get out.”

Gansey blinked. “I…beg your pardon?”

“Oh, you heard her, pretty boy,” the one named Calla sneered. 

She pushed herself up from the reading table, since the consultation was clearly over. The one who’d told him to get out was Maura, and she hastily scooped up her cards from the table. Gansey watched, bewildered, as the Death card disappeared back into the deck, along with the forbidden Page of Cups that he wasn’t allowed to claim on his own, despite drawing it twice before Death. She was careful not to touch the recorder sitting harmlessly by his hands, though her face looked tight with the effort not to smash it. The voices that had been captured, his and some mysterious other, had long since stopped talking and all that hissed in the air was the nighttime silence and Maura’s unexplained anger.

Next to him, Adam’s eyes flickered from the recorder to the deck and up to Maura. “Why?” he asked when Gansey didn’t.

“I don’t owe you an explanation. You need to leave. Now. I don’t know anything about your apparent haunting, and I don’t care to perform an exorcism on high schoolers.”

Persephone, the third and most psychic-looking of the three hummed something about pie, but her eyebrows had drawn together in a troubled expression. 

_ “Is that all?” _

Gansey finally clicked off the recorder and stood up. “Can you tell me nothing about the ley lines? About any of what this meant?” He gestured to the room at large, but he meant the non-reading, the undue anger at his St. Mark’s vigil. “Can I at least pay you?”

“Twenty,” Persephone said softly.

“Each!” Calla bellowed from the stairway. 

Sighing, Gansey handed the recorder to Adam, who tucked it into his bag and stood up with him. His expression didn’t betray it, but somewhere beneath his black eye and deliberate hands, Parrish was as unsettled as Gansey felt. The world continued to dip ever so slightly off its axis, and Gansey was at a loss. He thumbed out two twenties, then remembered Ronan, waiting in the Pig, and pulled out a third. He left them on the table while pointedly making eye contact with Maura. He didn’t know what he’d done to offend her; things like this were supposed to be their livelihood. He couldn’t imagine them keeping customers long enough to support them if they behaved like this. Only Persephone looked repentant, and he wondered if that wasn’t just her natural state of being. 

“We’re all adults here,” he said to no one in particular, still holding Maura’s gaze. “I believe in what you do. I believe a lot of things. There’s no reason to lie to me about what I’ve asked you to help me with. Just say you understand but you won’t help me.”

Gansey heard something complicated get swallowed down by Maura. She’d bristled when he said ‘adults’ and ‘lie.’ He couldn’t help thinking if it bothered her that much, then she shouldn’t have done it. 

“I understand. And I will not help you.”

Gansey nodded once. He would much rather have the truth, even if he felt like this was one of his infamous dead ends. One of the clues he’d waited months for, could hold in his hands for a breathless moment, then set aside for the next one to come along. He’d done this before; there was always another way. 

“Thank you for your time.” 

He turned and walked out of 300 Fox Way, Adam at his side and his keys leaving marks in his closed palm.

_ “That’s all there is.” _

**II.**

“Are you sleeping?”

The windows were open in Blue’s room when Maura walked in. The air smelled like fresh herbs and wildflowers, fitting for all the trees and leaves pasted to her walls and closet. The feathers hanging from her ceiling fan fluttered in the afternoon breeze. Blue didn’t answer her question, lying serenely on her bed with a blanket Persephone had quilted herself drawn up just under her folded hands. Maura didn’t know that she liked Blue’s hands folded, but she wouldn’t have liked them at her sides any better. Blue had often slept fiercely, messily, a sprawling rucked up mess by morning. This was unnatural and it was all her fault. 

She should have gone on the vigil.

Maura sat down on the edge of Blue’s bed, reaching out to push her hair back from her face. Still no fever, no sign of illness, nothing that any doctors would be able to pinpoint. She’d have to come up with something in a day or two for school.  _ Please, wake up. _ When Neeve had carried her home after the vigil, Maura demanded to know what had happened. Blue was the only non-psychic in the house; she was only there to amplify and record the future dead. Never in all the times they’d gone together had she seen any of the spirits, nor had she tried to talk to them. Neeve had said she hadn’t gotten to Blue in time because of all the other spirits. One minute she was writing down names and the next she was across the churchyard, bent on the ground next to the ghost of a boy. Asleep. Unconscious.  _ Not there _ . Maura had no explanation that anyone would understand. None of them did. 

She should have gone to the vigil. 

“They won’t stay out, those boys,” Persephone said from the doorway. 

Maura blew hair out of her face exasperatedly. Those boys. Blue would have hated them and loved them in turn. She’d always said Aglionby boys were bastards, and Gansey had no doubt been an Aglionby boy. But they were wild, loud without speaking, something  _ other _ . Maura sensed it on them the minute they walked in; it had almost been enough for her to turn them away on principle. It felt like too much after what had happened to Blue.

“I know,” she said balefully. 

Persephone made room for Calla to push her way inside, and the three of them in Blue’s tiny room was almost too much for Maura too. She could still feel Gansey, Adam and Ronan on the edges of her senses. She rubbed the back of her neck. 

Calla crossed her arms. Seeing Blue still discomfited her too. “She saw that boy. On the corpse road.”

“I know.”

“That means he’s the one,” Persephone added.

“I  _ know _ .” Maura wanted to scream, but instead she covered Blue’s hands with her own. Her daughter was never meant to be this still. Clinging to all this was the feel of death. The corpse road had taken Blue’s life, and Maura had no idea where to find it. She wasn’t ready to be alone. 

Persephone wrung her own hands as if she were still kneading pie crust. “It’s starting. It would have whether you helped him or not.”

Maura shouldn’t have turned Gansey away, but it had felt safer too. The corpse road had already taken enough from the Sargents, she had no idea what opening up the doors to that knowledge would have cost her. Or him. But it was starting. Oh, it was starting.

**III.**

“Girl?”

Ronan moved through the trees slowly. Something had changed since the last time he’d been here. It wasn’t unusual for him to feel like he wasn’t alone here. Even the trees had a presence in this forest, and he was aware of them. This didn’t feel like a nightmare either, a fact for which he was grateful. He could never be too sure what would provoke them, and even though the alcohol had taken the edge off, his mind was an endless loop of  _ a secret killed your father _ and  _ that’s all there is _ . This deep into his dreams, everything felt like it was amplified, a stereo speaker with no music playing, the volume as high as it would go. It had never felt like this before. 

He moved carefully, stepping over enormous roots that he knew were underfoot without even looking down. These trees were like family. Ronan’s hands moved over rippling bark while the leaves whispered over his head. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but every nerve was alive with the chase. He was bringing back something tonight and the anticipation sang in his blood. The buzz he’d fallen asleep with didn’t stand a chance against the high of dreaming. It was life.

“Are you here?” he called out, feeling untethered by reality. 

“ _ Ego adsum, Greywaren _ ,” called back to him, musical and timid. Greywaren, I am here.

Ronan saw her then, her tiny skullcap and her fantastical furred legs ending in dainty hooves. No matter how many times he saw her, he was both fascinated and a little put off. 

“There you are, you little shit. Whatcha got there?”

He pointed to something in her hands. It looked like paper, but he didn’t assume. In his dreams, hornets became ladybugs became monsters in the time it took for him to blink, for his mood to change. Orphan Girl worried the edges of it with her hands and looked over her shoulder as if she were wordlessly asking for permission.

“Hey!” Ronan snapped his fingers to get her attention back. This was his dream, no one else’s. “I said, what do you have?”

Orphan Girl took a step forward and then another before she glanced back again. Clenching his teeth, Ronan growled and stalked past her, trying to see into the tangle of tree trunks beyond them for whatever might have his little dream girl spooked. He felt more than saw the sensation of something withdrawing. Not a night horror, thank God, but  _ something _ he couldn’t name. It messed with his senses, like many things did in his dreams. This was a forest where sounds were things you could taste and the things you caught from the corner of your eye had a scent. Ronan wasn’t sure what he could trust. His dream shifted around him. He felt ‘blue’ like walking through dew-covered spidersilk on an early morning. It wasn’t anything he could see with his eyes, it was just something he knew. Not a color, not an emotion. 

Just blue.

“ _ Greywaren _ .” Orphan girl tugged on his sleeve, and the dream became unpredictable again. 

Ronan looked down to see her put the paper in his hand. 

“A gift,” she said. He tasted the voices of the trees.  _ Talk to us _ .

“I have to find…”

Ronan closed his hand around the paper, memorizing the feel of it against his fingers. It had lines like it had been torn out of a school notebook. That was what he was supposed to bring back. A map with familiar Henrietta streets on it. A hasty square that was marked simply THE CHURCH in unfamiliar handwriting.

Ronan woke up.

**IV.**

It had been over a week since they’d gone back to the magical forest Cabeswater. Gansey insisted that they find out more about it, which had resulted in Adam squeezing more study sessions and trips to the local library and the Henrietta courthouse around his three jobs. Truth be told, all this research felt easier now that they’d seen actual results. All of Gansey’s theorizing and energy sensing machines and dowsing rods had been interesting enough, something Adam found himself wanting to believe in. But now there was a forest. They had gotten in that godforsaken helicopter and Ronan had obnoxiously suggested a direction out of the blue, and now there was a  _ forest _ . Adam had never seen Gansey that happy before and it was admittedly contagious. It turned all of Adam’s suspicions about being watched and that anxious under-the-skin feel of something about to happen into joy. It was Gansey’s quest and he’d given it freely to Adam and Ronan. Now they could believe in magic together. 

Adam still expected to wake up one morning in the real world, where magic forests didn’t exist and Gansey was as Aglionby as they came, and freedom from the Henrietta dust was as close as graduation day. 

“The Lynches are at church and I know you have the day off,” Gansey said quietly on the other end of the phone. He didn’t have to be quiet, but because Adam felt he had to be, he did so out of habit. “I thought perhaps we could go exploring. Maybe that church on Ronan’s map.”

An hour later found them trudging through the densely green, abandoned area around the church. Despite how clear it was that the faithful hadn’t worshipped here in quite some time, the air felt charged. Adam wouldn’t have claimed God lingered, but something did, just at the edges of their vision, just out of their reach. It wasn’t often that he and Gansey went exploring on their own. Adam would have assumed that a privilege meant for Ronan, like there was something sacred and forbidden about stealing this time for himself. It was selfish, and he knew it, but a little part of him was pleased Gansey had asked him to come along. Gansey’s machine blipped and fussed in Adam’s hands while Gansey poked carefully at the ground with a stick he’d found back by the car. 

“It feels as though we’ve really found something, Parrish.” 

Adam looked up from the blinking red lights, seeing Gansey paused by a pile of stone that may once have been part of a wall. There was wonder in his voice, the same as he’d been hearing for weeks since they’d first discovered Cabeswater. But there was something else that Adam couldn’t place, the side of Gansey that he didn’t take to Aglionby or Nino’s or his parents’ house. That little part of him leaned into this glimpse of the real Gansey. 

“I want to tell you why.”

“Why?” Adam echoed, his brows knotting. “You mean Glendower?”

Gansey swept his stick over the ground and moved deeper into the wood. “I mean why Glendower.” 

When he said  _ why Glendower _ , he also meant why Epipens, why he flinched when something buzzed by his ear. He told Adam about the day he’d been stung hundreds of times, the day his heart had stopped, and the words that had been spoken to him when he did. All Gansey had needed to say was  _ you will live because of Glendower _ , and Adam had known the rest. It was burned onto his memory, etched onto his skeptical heart. Those words, whole or in pieces, were scattered all through the journal, they were the reason they hunted ley lines. Adam’s skin crawled with the heft of knowing this, as if he’d been allowed to feel what Gansey felt that day. He’d been allowed to understand what all this was for. Adam felt like he’d known it all along, even though he was hearing it for the first time today. What did it change? Nothing? Everything? 

Gansey smiled thinly at him, looking up at the thunderheads, evaluating the path ahead. It would only get darker, and then his stick would be useless. “We should…”

The machine Adam held went dead. Gansey looked down.

**V.**

Blue Sargent couldn’t really explain the sadness she felt when the ritual came to pass. Sacrifice, her mother had told her, was something you had to mean for it to work. She hadn’t known these boys long, only as long as they’d spent in Cabeswater. They were Aglionby, every last one of them, and she should have hated them. But there was something about them that burned brighter than the raven crest. They were like her mom, Persephone and Calla - something  _ more _ . Oh, how she longed to be on this adventure with them. She wanted to know this forest without being of it. This was not how she’d expected to learn that magic was real. But they had the map, they’d found their way to her. She didn’t know what would happen after that. 

_ Safe _ , the trees told her, and even though she didn’t understand their language, her heart knew. 

Her memories of the St. Mark’s Eve vigil were hazy, but she remembered the boy. The only one she could see, the only one she could hear. 

_ Please. Will you tell me your name? _

“Gansey.” She said it now, but they didn’t hear her.

That night, she’d seen her very first spirit. She could talk to him, and to write down his name, she had been able to ask it all on her own. That had cost her more than she thought possible. While she had been trying to give, something was taking from her. And it had taken nearly everything. The last thing she remembered was this boy. And he was the first thought in her mind when she woke in Cabeswater. She didn’t understand anything. 

Blue watched everything happen — that awful man who wanted the power so much he'd murder his so-called best friend, her very strange half-aunt with the pretty hands and unsettling stare. The raven boys, Adam, they’d stopped a terrible thing from happening to Cabeswater. The world felt like it ended and then restarted, and Blue wondered if she would ever be able to go home. She wondered if she would ever know Gansey before he died.

_ Is that all? _

Magic is real, Blue told herself.

_ That’s all there is. _

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello or yell at me about TRC over at [my blog](http://oldkingyounggod.tumblr.com)!


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